So he sent gifts to the approaching foreigners. Women went out with food, and a messenger welcomed the intruders with an offering that their record keepers failed to name. Altamahas paddled the newcomers across the Oconee River, and there, on its banks, Zamumo met this strange party of bearded men, their immense horses, their fierce war dogs, their voracious and innumerable pigs, and their leader, Hernando de Soto. From de Soto, Zamumo received a gift of a silver-colored feather. He accepted gratefully. “You are from heaven,” he replied in the words of a later chronicler, “and this your feather that you give me, I can eat with it; I will go forth to war with it; I will sleep with my wife with it.”2
It would be easy to dismiss Zamumo’s words, words recorded many years later by a chronicler who did not speak his language, as Europeans indulging their fantasies of American apotheosis, but the words tell much about a distant and forever lost world. Feathers were powerful symbols, representing lightness, purity, and power. They came from the creatures of the skies. The great bird effigy that one of Zamumo’s predecessors wore as part of a headdress and took to his grave some time around 1300 c.e. remains one of the most remarkable examples of this sacred iconography.3 Zamumo’s words also fit into this larger cosmology. Three and a half centuries after the chief allegedly uttered them, one archaeologist surmised that Altamahas and many other southeastern Indians celebrated three types of rituals centered on communal cohesion and harvest, warfare, and ancestor worship. When Zamumo shared his hopes for good harvests for his followers, great success on the battlefield, and abundant offspring to support his authority and succeed him when he died, he acknowledged that his gift could serve him in all three ritual settings. He further acknowledged the power of the gift and its giver when he asked de Soto if he should offer him the tribute he usually sent to Ocute.4 Zamumo’s gifts—those he offered as well as those he received—symbolized how the power of the foreign supported the security and autonomy of the leader and his community.
With his question regarding tribute, Zamumo revealed his hopes that de Soto and Ocute might both compete for his friendship. In the Southeast, a people with multiple partners could always hope for leverage against both by pitting one against the other. Whatever his ambitions, Zamumo failed to harness these newcomers for old practices because de Soto refused to challenge Ocute during his short stay in the Oconee Valley. More ominously, he initiated a host of unforeseen changes. Within a generation of this meeting at Altamaha, the mound-building peoples of the Southeast, including the Altamahas, began to decline, and the ambitions of Europeans for the lands that some called “La Florida” began to grow. De Soto failed in his search for riches, but in the two centuries after 1540, other Europeans found wealth in trade with the Indians and in raising their own crops for sale to countrymen across the Atlantic. Exchange remained important, but by the early eighteenth century, Indians traded deerskins and captives for an ever-expanding list of European tools, weapons, and cloth. The gifts that had once tied a few leaders together with bonds of reciprocity and mutual obligation had apparently given way to commodities that bound many men and women in relations of prices and profits. As South Carolina’s preeminent trader and imperialist Thomas Nairne observed of the Indians in 1708, “They Effect them most who sell best cheap.”5 Three decades later, the German traveler and artist Philip George Friedrich von Reck seemed to capture British mercantile dominance over French and Spanish rivals in several watercolors of Yuchis living along the upper Savannah River. In one portrait of the chief Senkaitschi and his wife, the couple displayed the latest in English-sponsored fashion: she with a blue skirt and a white blanket trimmed with a red stripe, he with a red breech-clout and blue leggings.
Figure 1. Medlin copper plate (ca. 1300 c.e.). Measuring approximately 13.7 cm on a side, this figure of a falcon was affixed to the front of a leader’s headdress at the small hole in the center. From Mark Williams, Archaeological Excavations at Shinholser Site (9BL1): 1985 & 1987, LAMAR Institute Publication 4 (Watkinsville, Ga., 1990), 235. Reprinted courtesy of Mark Williams.
Such transformations had consequences far beyond material culture for Senkaitschi, his wife, and their contemporaries. Indeed, as John Stuart, the British official in charge of southeastern Indian affairs, noted in 1764, trade was the “Original great tie between Indians and Europeans.”6 His characterization includes far more than the Southeast. Exchange between Europeans and Indians had provided the foundations for all early contacts in North America, and two centuries after de Soto it remained the defining feature of Native-colonial relations west of the Appalachians. The significance of these ties has led historians to explore the variety of ways that these peoples dealt with one another through the things they traded. In most cases, historians have concluded that Indians eventually accepted European commercial norms as a first slippery step toward their economic and political subordination. In such analyses, observations like Nairne’s serve as pithy epitaphs for Natives’ independence.7
Figure 2. Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck, “The Indian King and Queen of the Uchi Senkaitschi” (1734). Senkaitschi and his wife are both wearing English woolens. A corner of her blue skirt shows just under her white blanket with red trim. His bright blue leggings contrast sharply with his red breechclout. His robe is made from buffalo skin. Courtesy of the Manuscript Department, Royal Danish Library.
Histories of exchange deserve more sustained examination, though, and a new look at the Southeast at least makes clear that Indians continued to insist on practices that were both older than and distinct from European logics of the market even after Senkaitschi and his wife began wearing English wool. In fact, Senkaitschi probably acquired his clothes either as English gifts or at prices set by diplomats. Only a close study of the dynamics of exchange allows us to see how Indians and Europeans blended commercial and diplomatic norms. Despite their different backgrounds, both Natives and newcomers were familiar with the political and economic calculations behind exchange, whether giving generously or buying cheaply and selling dearly. Generations of negotiations meant that Zamumo, the prudent seeker of multiple patrons, became Nairne’s shrewd shopper, who in turn became Senkaitschi, the material beneficiary of mid-century diplomacy. Even amid such change, though, Indians continued to seek out those who could offer power with the fewest demands, but they were doing so as peoples who had not abandoned the power of gifts. A history of Zamumo’s own town of Altamaha is a testament to these resilient ideals. Although de Soto declined to challenge Ocute’s claim to Zamumo’s loyalty, later Altamahas managed to use other Spanish gifts to escape Ocute’s orbit. In fact, Altamahas used ties with neighboring Indians, Spaniards, and eventually the English to acquire a measure of local autonomy and regional influence in 1700 that Zamumo could have never imagined in 1540. In light of such complex and shifting blends of ritual and commercial norms, it is clear that we need to look more closely at the exchanges that many historians who study the colonial period have discussed but few have placed at the centers of their histories.8
But first, I should introduce the setting within which these exchanges occurred. The lands that will be of greatest interest to me are those of the southeastern interior, especially those that lay between the Oconee Valley in central Georgia and the Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama Valleys of central Alabama. They supported peoples who lived just beyond the limits of initial European